- Lists should be guidelines. But they pretend to be commandments.
- Lists are usually a personal representation of a more complex world: each reader would have pointed out different aspects, not just those ones.
- Lists represent a "compressed archive" of some more thoughtful reasoning. They cannot replace a well-written document.
- There are no good lists and bad lists: lists have no soul, no will :)
- There is a tendency to grow the list in a more structured way, thus transforming the list into a document tree. But want to save the trees, don't we? :)
- When someone reads a list, he/she feels an incoercible desire of building up his/her own list.
- Most of the bullet points are just obvious statements we could have made without them.
- A list cannot contain sufficient information to strengthen or weaken an argument. It's insane to pretend that a list can save you from a higher-pitch-debate.
- When you feel confident that the list has been "marble carved" in your brain, the first thing you do happens to violate the guidelines contained in the list!
- Sometimes it happens that the list is made of 13 or 9 elements. Some weird mental constraint (it has to be long enough, but not too long) lead the writer to cut out 3 interesting ones or to add one dumb bullet point to it. Like this one is!
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